Monday, 5 June 2017

It was some weeks back that a reader informed me of a previously unreported eyewitness account that had been posted on the Internet. I contacted the witness and discussed the case with him before agreeing to republish the account here. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we go straight to the account as told by one of the two witnesses that day over eleven years ago.

I am writing this under a pseudonym. I am an American working in a field
involving considerable professional scrutiny. The one time I discussed
this, at a family holiday party after a few drinks, I was laughed at
and ribbed for the next few years, so I can only imagine how my present
employers might react!

In March of 2006, I visited Loch Ness with my then girlfriend. It was
the last week of the month (either the 28th or 29th). We were at
Inverness for business purposes, hers not mine. We decided to visit the
famous castle on the water and as we drove from Inverness we saw
something in the water.

The time was late afternoon, I would say between four and five. We'd
been day drinking which made driving on the other side of the car even
more interesting than it already was! It also somewhat compromises the
specific details such as precise location and time.

When my girlfriend began exclaiming that "there's something in the
water," I laughed and said she was joking. Finally I realised she was
being serious and pulled off to a lay by somewhere near the Clansman
hotel (I remember because we went in afterwards to the gift shop to tell
everyone what we had seen). As soon as I pulled over, my girlfriend was
pointing at the water and I saw it.

I can't really judge size on water, its not my speciality, but it was
HUGE. It looked like a whale. I would say it was grey like an elephant
with a neck that was swinging side to side over the water. That was
really what it looked like, an elephant waving its trunk. There was a
huge commotion in the water behind it. The thing was just massive. It
was swimming back toward Inverness the way we came.

My girlfriend was fumbling to get her camera out of luggage in the back
seat before the monster was gone. She was tipsy and we were both
shaking. She finally got it out of her bag and took a picture through
the car window. We were so shaken up that neither of us thought to roll
down the window. She tried to take another snap but her memory card was
full, and as she fumbled to delete sightseeing pictures to make more
room, it was gone. It just sort of went down while it continued swimming
toward Inverness.

In retrospect I wish we had taken photos of the water afterward which
was quite disturbed, but it wasn't until I began reading up on the
subject that I realised it might have been of value. We took the picture
to the gift shop and the lady at the counter told us to go the
exhibition centre to show it, but we got cold feet and just went back to
the hotel at Inverness and drank some more. When we got back to the
States, we put it on the computer and pretty much never looked at it
again or even talked about the experience. It was almost like we felt
guilty.

My girlfriend and I long ago broke up and I have since married, and the
one time I told my wife (it was the holiday party at her family's
house), the response was so embarrassing that whenever she jokes about
"that time Justin saw Nessie," I just sort of laugh it off.

I just found the picture last week on a CD rom containing files I
removed from my ex's computer before I moved out following the breakup.
It was in a folder with 90s alternative rock mp3s! I hadn't looked at it
in years and while the quality isn't great considering it was just a
point and shoot she'd owned for a couple years, it still made my heart
skip a beat. Seeing it again caused me a sleepless night because I am
sure I saw something that isn't supposed to exist, and over the years I
sort of talked myself out of it (too much beer that day, etc). Now its
all back again, and I feel a little shaky.

It wasn't a pleasant
experience, even though there was no threat of physical harm.

I am not a Loch Ness Monster enthusiast and know as much as the average
person. I didn't care about it and certainly wasn't looking for it. Same
with my ex. All I have is the photo, taken through the passengers side
window (slight camera reflection) showing a dark body and neck low over
the water. I am afraid to publicly post it in case I am penalised since I
wasn't the photographer and don't own the copyright. Things ended badly
and I can't imagine it would be a pleasant conversation if I reached
out to her. But I want to share it and don't know how.

The sketch at the top of the article is based on the photograph taken that day as well as some of the witness' recollection of the day. The witness was reticent to put the photograph on the Internet because of the issues mentioned above, but having pointed him to my blog, the research done there and the welcome it gives to witnesses who fear ridicule, he sent me the image on the condition I showed it to no one else and delete it after use.

Based on that photograph, I could make some observations.

I have confirmed the location of the photo as the Clansman Hotel area.

There is no EXIF data with the image, so I cannot confirm the date it was recorded.

I recently went to the loch and took some comparison shots, which I outline below

The object is blurred as if to indicate motion. This is indicated by
the fact that the background hills and foreground bushes show no sign of blurring. The
presumed neck is more blurred than the bulk of the body, which is consistent with his description of the neck moving from side to side. There is a
strong wake behind the object which indicates said motion and also that
it is rapid.

The image size is about 320kb, so closer inspection of the object is
not possible. Access to the original Mb image would be useful (as well
as for the exif data).

Detecting image manipulation would required the original image, but I see no indications of image manipulation.

The camera taking the picture is reflected in the image indicating the car window was rolled up as testified.

I then indulged in some speculations. The only object of comparison would be a dark boat. Most boats are
light in colour or multicoloured. Either way, other unorthodox objects
need to be considered and eliminated as required - jet skis, speedboats,
windsurfers, yachts. None seem to fit the shape of this object unless
they assumed some strange contortions.

The object is basically blackish which is curious since I also did a calculation
as to the sun's position at the stated time and date. The sun would have
been behind the observers and slightly to their right. The conditions
look overcast in the picture, so there may not have been much
reflection. All this would indicate an intrinsically dark
object.

The
object is hundreds of yards away so details are confined to gross
morphology. A comparison shot which included a Jacobite boat was taken by myself in April and is shown below. The witness photograph was then overlaid onto this picture, aligning the background hill contours as carefully as possible.

This was the best picture and I think shows the Jacobite Warrior cruise
boat. Its beam or width is 8 meters and measuring the relative image sizes of
the two, an estimate of monster size can be made as follows based on measurements I made with a ruler on the computer screen display.

Jacobite Warrior beam/width = 8m

Width on screen = 16mm

Width of object "body" = 8mm maps to4m (13ft)

Width of whole object = 13mm maps to 6.5m (21ft)

So the "monster" is over 20 feet long including what we presume to be
the neck, which was a little more difficult to estimate due to motion
blur.Again, this is consistent with the witness' description of the object being "huge".

There are some caveats. The "monster" is a bit further out and so is actually bigger in terms of perspective.The boat rear is at a slight angle to us and so the apparent
foreshortening makes its measured length a little less than 8m. These
two observations probably cancel each other out to a certain extent.

Based on this, I
am pretty sure that is not a bird like a swan or cormorant taking off as it disturbs the water with its feet. The object in the picture is
uniformly dark and swans are white. Given the sun was behind the
photographer, I would not expect a white swan to turn out black. I also
note an absence of anything I would call wings in the picture.

Cormorants
are darker, but the "body" in the picture looks larger in proportion to
the "neck" than for cormorants which have quite big necks/heads.
Besides, I again think this object is further out than that. There is a
line below the object which is most likely a boat wake, so we are out
there with the boats.

As an aside, the witness took a considerable bit of flak on another forum when he refused to publish the picture. Part of that would be the usual sceptic disdain, but some of it I suspect was an attempt to goad the witness into publishing, which he resolutely refused to do. Whatever the mix of intentions, witnesses with a story to tell may be deterred from coming forward when they see exchanges such as this. That is very sad.

In conclusion, the photograph is a good one by Loch Ness Monster standards. Obviously, I would like it to be out there for others to examine and form their own opinions. Perhaps that time will come, but for all that, it is a reported sighting of the monster, photo or no photo and that qualifies it for inclusion in the growing list of people who have claimed to have seen the creature since decades past.